22 days after its IPO, Eloqua’s Joe Chernov departs to lead marketing for Kinvey

It’s been a couple of years since Eloqua‘s Joe Chernov and I first worked together on projects for TNW. I met him through a connection to my friends Leslie Bradshaw and Jesse Thomas of JESS3. In the time that has followed I’ve seen Eloqua move into the enviable position of being one of the most trusted brand marketing companies in the world.

The company has recently hit Nasdaq with its IPO, but today Chernov has announced that he’s leaving to head up marketing for Backend-as-a-Service company Kinvey (Check our coverage of the company’s goals here). Yep, he’s walking away from a company very soon after its IPO, chasing goals instead of money.

“The experience of ‘going public’ mattered more to me than the proceeds. This has ‘famous last words’ written all over it, but money isn’t my primary motivator. Building stuff is.” – Joe Chernov

As admirable as that is, there’s still the question of why Chernov would seek to join a startup rather than a bigger company like Facebook, which also focuses on building products. For that answer, Chernov turns to comic books:

“Start-ups are like super hero movies. Watching Peter Parker become Spiderman is the most exciting part. After that, it’s just a bunch of action. I joined a start-up because ‘becoming’ is more interesting than ‘became.'”

The challenges that Chernov will face at Kinvey would be daunting by anyone’s standards. Mobile development doesn’t get a whole lot of marketing attention, and so Chernov will have the task of essentially writing the playbook for how that marketing should be done.

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Kinvey was a graduate of 2011’s TechStars Boston class, and has been pushing forward at quite the clip since Demo Day.  Recently exiting a beta stage, the company announced its $5 million Series A and it’s been hiring aggressively the entire time. Bringing Chernov on board is the answer to what Kinvey CEO Sravish Sridhar considers to be “the hardest startup hire in Boston.”